Dave Darrin's Second Year at Annapolis eBook

The battleships were well in sight of Eastern King
Point when the midshipmen’s call for supper
formation sounded. Feeling that they would much
have preferred to wait for their supper, the young
men hastened below.

After the line was formed it seemed to the impatient
young men as though it had never taken so long to
read the orders.

Yet there came one welcome order, to the effect that,
immediately after the morning meal, all midshipmen
might go to the pay officer and draw ten dollars,
to be charged against their pay accounts.

“That ten dollars apiece looms up large David,
little giant,” murmured Dan Dalzell, while the
evening meal was in progress.

“We ought to have a lot of fun on it,”
replied Darrin, who was looking forward with greatest
eagerness to his first visit to any foreign soil.
“But how much shore leave are we to have?”

“Two days, the word is. We’ll get
it straight in the morning, at breakfast formation.”

In defiance of regulations, Midshipman Pennington,
whose father was wealthy, had several hundred dollars
concealed in his baggage. He had already invited
Hallam, Mossworth and Dickey to keep in his wake on
shore, and these young men had gladly enough agreed.

“Say, but we’re slackening speed!”
quivered Dalzell, when the meal was nearly finished.

“Headway has stopped,” declared Darrin
a few moments later.

“Listen, everyone!” called Farley.
“Don’t you hear the rattle of the anchor
chains?”

“Gentlemen, as we’re forbidden to make
too much racket,” proposed irrepressible Dan,
“let us give three silent cheers for Old England!”

Rising in his place, Dan raised his hand aloft, and
brought it down, as his lips silently formed a “hurrah!”

Three times this was done, each time the lips of the
midshipmen forming a silent cheer.

Then Dan, with a mighty swoop of his right arm, let
his lips form the word that everyone knew to be “tiger!”

“Ugh-h-h!” groaned Midshipman Reilly.

“Throw that irresponsible Fenian out!”
directed Dan, grinning.

Then the midshipmen turned their attention to the
remnants of the meal.

Boom! sounded sharply overhead.

“There goes the twenty-one-gunner,” announced
Darrin.

When a foreign battleship enters a fortified port
the visiting fleet, or rather, its flagship, fires
a national salute of twenty-one guns. After a
short interval following the discharge of the last
gun, one of the forts on shore answers with twenty-one
guns. This is one of the methods of observing
the courtesies between nations by their respective
fleets.

Ere all the guns had been fired from the flagship,
the third classmen received the rising signal; the
class marched out and was dismissed. Instantly
a break was made for deck.

The midshipmen were in good time to see the smoke
and hear the roar of guns from one of the forts on
shore.